Monday 16 September 2013

Pelagios Chapter 3: Early Geospatial Documents

A few weeks ago we trailed that we had some exciting news and now we can finally announce it. Thanks to the generosity of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Pelagios is entering a third, even more ambitious phase. We will be extending the Pelagios approach to all early geospatial documents up to 1492 (a game-changing year for the history of cartography). This means that we'll be dealing with texts and maps, not only from the ancient Greco-Roman worlds, but also the early Byzantine, Christian, Maritime, Islamic and Chinese traditions.


With a digital place index of maps and descriptions of the world in place, researchers and the general public will be able to explore online the historical significance of both famous and obscure places in the history of geography. As just one example, Claudius Ptolemy used London as one of his primary reference points for global time zones in the late second century, just as we do today. While such coincidences may be rare, and many places in early maps and texts are unidentified, or existed only in the popular or religious imaginations, our aim is to help their rich biographies to be told. With such an unprecedented variety of data linked together, it will be possible to trace in broad terms the continuities - and discontinuities - of people's responses to the world around them. Equally exciting, and thanks to the continuing annotation of data by Pelagios growing community of partners, you'll also be able to bring together disparate fragments of its life history, its connections with other places, its stories and imagery.

The project raises significant technological challenges as well. First of all we will need to make sure that URI-based gazetteers (standardised lists of places) are available for all of our periods and regions, and aligned with one another so that they can be cross-referenced. This means working not only with our old friends at Pleiades, but also with new ones at the China Historical GIS and PastPlace. Then we will need to use a raft of methods, old and new, to identify toponyms in texts and images, and in a range of languages. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – a computer-based method for the automatic recognition of text in digitized images – is inadequate for use with medieval handwritten script. Therefore we are developing new, semi-automatic methods, which employ image processing and statistical approaches to eliminate as much of the tedious manual work of transcription as possible. Third, we will need to relate those place references to the gazetteers, building on the knowledge and expertise of a network of experts, along with a few tricks of our own. Places that we can't identify we intend to throw out to the public, along with any clues we have available, to invite the wider community to have a go. Finally, we continue to work on the Pelagios search API and web interface so that the results will become ever easier to work with and incorporate in other digital resources online.

In addition to the continually growing community of projects providing content about all these places, we will be working in collaboration with specialists from all around the world, including from the British Library, Queen Mary, University of London, KCL, the University of Portsmouth, the University of Edinburgh, the Orient Institute of Beirut, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Drew University and Harvard University. If you would like to get involved in any way, please do contact us!


9 comments:

  1. Offtopic regarding your map of roman cities:

    Sisapo is proven, you can delete the "?" in "Sisapo?".

    Cerro de las Monas may be (hypothesis) "Sisapo Nova", and the other probably is "Sisapo Vetus".

    Source (in spanish):

    http://books.google.es/books?id=P6fysvX4eQ4C&lpg=PA369&dq=sisapo&hl=es&pg=PA369#v=onepage&q&f=false

    http://www.uam.es/otros/cupauam/pdf/Cupauam20/2008.pdf (pg. 174, 19*)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Pichuneke. The labels here come from the Pleiades project which provides a gazetteer for Pelagios. We'll pass this information on to them and you may also want to contribute to them directly as appreciate contributions from the community: http://pleiades.stoa.org/

      Delete
  2. hey I love history <nd have a little of my own too.
    finf the idea great.
    if you need manpower i am willing to help

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks :-) Once the project is fully up and running it will be possible for members of the public to make suggestions for place identifications as well. Watch this space!

      Delete
  3. What about the accuracy of data? Who are this partners who enrich the information basis of this project? thanks for the answers
    Should we trust the data?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a great question. We will overwhelmingly be using secondary scholarship for identifications. The role of Pelagios is simply to record these in a way that they can be compared across different datasets (previously such comparisons could only be done manually). Every entry will also record the source of where these identifications come from so that users can make their own judgements as to reliability. Nevertheless, the questions you ask should still always be asked of this resource, just as with any other. We think that that most of the identifications will be correct, but there are bound to be errors, and serious scholars will make sure to check the results carefully when using them for anything other than general arguments or overviews.

      Delete
  4. What an exciting initiative! Are there any plans to go back further than classical sources eg to Egyptian or Mesopotamian ones?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, but we are dependent on the availability of digital gazetteers to do so. Most importantly they must assign a unique web address (a URL) to each place so that we can link to it. The first phases of Pelagios used the Pleiades gazetteer of Greek and Roman places (http://pleiades.stoa.org/). Pelagios 3 will also include the PastPlace and China Historical GIS gazetteers to expand our scope temporally and geographically. Places from the Tubingen Atlas of the Middle East are being incorporated into Pleiades and once this process is complete, we will be able incorporate links to relevant resources in these periods as well.

      Delete
    2. Just a follow up that I had another look at our partner list and we actually have a fairly good showing for Egypt, including data from the following projects (not including large datasets which are not exclusively Egyptian):
      Trismegistos: http://www.trismegistos.org/
      Meketre: http://meketre.org/
      Papyri.info: http://papyri.info/
      Totenbuch: http://totenbuch.awk.nrw.de

      Coverage of Mesopotamia is more limited but we have some content from the Oracc project (which in turn is connected to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI):
      http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/
      http://cdli.ucla.edu/

      Delete